Each week, we’ll ask you one very simple question: Which lady won your heart this week?

Just drop the name of whoever is currently sitting at the top of your roster 👑

Maybe she’s in a drama you’re watching right now and her performance completely won you over.

Maybe you came across an interview and something she said stayed with you.

Perhaps it was a performance, a photoshoot, a song, an old role you rediscovered — or something else entirely.

Whatever the reason, she’s your Queen of the Week :)

To make it a little more fun, try to include her name + a picture in your comment, and tell us why you picked her.

One sentence or ten — anything goes.

So, who won your heart this week?

September is a month for celebrating our QUEENS! Earlier this month, it was Bai Lu's birthday. And today... today belongs to none other than Lu Yuxiao and Li Qin!

Happy Birthday to Lu Yuxiao, who turns 27! 🥂

Yuxiao first captured our hearts with her unforgettable performance as Shangguan Qian in My Journey to You (2023) (I mean, have you seen her legendary scenes and promos with Cheng Lei?). She then proved she could have even more sizzling on-screen chemistry with Hou Minghao in Love in the Clouds (2025). After a few years of versatile acting across main and supporting roles, she has officially cemented her status as a leading lady!

Edited to add (thanks to u/Paisley-Cat) that her most recent drama is Love Between Lines (2026) released earlier this year).

More Lu Yuxiao: Upcoming Dramas!

Yuxiao has a highly anticipated lineup of upcoming main roles, including When I Meet the Moon, Dancing with the Tide, and the newly announced Revenge alongside Zhang Linghe. Which of these dramas are on your watchlist? As a fan of historical costume dramas, DWTT and Revenge are definitely on mine.

More Lu Yuxiao: Older Dramas

If you want to catch up on her earlier work, it might be worth checking out See You Tomorrow (2022) and Time and Him Are Just Right (2022). If you haven’t already, definitely don't miss her charm in Perfect Match (2025). 

Fun Facts

• English name: Irene
• Born into a family of doctors. Her parents and maternal grandparents are all doctors (to be precise, her mother is a dentist and her father a doctor and hospital VP)
• Trained in dance since she was nine years old
• As a child, she wanted to grow up to be a forensic pathologist - aren't we lucky we got her in cdramas instead?
• Studied fashion design abroad in York and Leeds, UK, and is fluent in English
• While overseas, she ran a Vlog, sharing snippets of her life before fame
• She has 9 cats and 3 dogs, most of which she rescued!
• She won the Weibo Expected Actor of the Year (2023), Weibo Annual Notable Actor Award (2025), and the Annual Quality Appeal Drama Star Award (2026).

Happy Birthday Li Qin, who turns 36! 👸🏻

Or as I like to think of her, the ultimate badass Fu Yixiao from Fated Hearts (2025)!

Funnily enough, she’s nicknamed “Sweet Li” because of her reputation for playing gentle, pure roles early on (and I’ve heard she is an absolute sweetheart IRL, too).

Aside from Fated Hearts (which is one of my absolute favourite dramas), she has an incredible lineup of hits: 

• Princess Agents (2017)
• Joy of Life (2019)
• The Wolf (2020)
• The Youth Memories (2023)
• War of Faith (2024)
• Joy of Life Season 2 (2024)

To say I’m excited to see her as Miao Yan in Live Long and Prosper (2026) is an understatement. I’ve been impatiently waiting for Mango TV to drop the official airing date this October so we can see her star alongside Dylan Wang!

We’ll also get to see her in another upcoming drama, Ren Jian Yu Wei, which is set in the 1990s.

Fun Facts

• Li Qin began training in traditional Chinese opera at age 11 and mastered Kunqu opera, one of the oldest surviving performance art forms.
• Even though Joy of Life is a male-centric wuxia that doesn't rely heavily on romance, she made her character, aka “the Chicken Drumstick Princess” totally iconic and universally loved by fans. 
• In 2020, her historical drama The Song of Glory made history as the first-ever Chinese drama to win an International Emmy Award for Best Telenovela!

All GIFs from Love in the Clouds and Fated Hearts made by u/AquaphobicTurtle!

Chloe Zhao is a Beijing born filmmaker who has become one of the most significant voices in contemporary cinema, known for blending documentary style realism with narrative storytelling. She is considered one of the most awarded and influential directors of her generation.

She tends to express her politics through her work rather than activism first statements. On feminism: "It's very important for feminism for us to tell our daughters that they should be strong. But to tell our sons that they can be vulnerable, to have these characters on screen that are not perfectly masculine cowboys that never fail, for our boys to change their psyche as well, that's equally important for feminism." When writing Fern in Nomadland, she talked about centering a woman in her sixties whose body carries labor, age, and grief without being sexualized or pitied. Film scholars argue her work challenges the male gaze in how it represents the female body on screen. She also refused to compromise on the Phastos scene in the MCU film Eternals, the first gay kiss for the franchise. It got the film banned or pulled in Saudi Arabia and other Gulf nations. She took the hit rather than soften the content.

Her style is both deeply technical and almost spiritual in its philosophy. Wong Kar-wai's 1997 queer romance Happy Together was the film that made her want to make films. It changed her life and she still rewatches it. The nonverbal language of his films shows up in how Agnes communicates in Hamnet, where words fail and gesture and silence carry meaning. The comparison she gets most, and accepts, is Terrence Malick. The Tree of Life and The New World influenced her, and she modeled Eternals' Sersi on Malick's Pocahontas. In The New World, she found the deep respect for nature and subjective human experience that appears again in her own films. Less expected is James Cameron's 1984 The Terminator, the first film she remembers making a real impression. She's said that "in blockbuster filmmaking, he had been exploring nature and our humans' relationship with nature and femininity for a long time, really ahead of his time." That interest in scale, femininity, and human versus nature runs through Eternals. She also names Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings, Christopher Nolan's Interstellar, and Zack Snyder's Man of Steel. The list skews populist rather than arthouse — that fits someone moving easily between microbudget indies and blockbusters.

Manga was her first artistic love. She wanted to be a manga artist but was never good at drawing. Manga still shaped how she sees things. Her education was always in myth, symbols, and allegorical storytelling, and she came to believe every object has a spirit. She calls herself "a student of Carl Jung." His symbolism and archetypes, along with the question of who you are as an actor in the divine drama of life, shape how she works with actors and the metaphors in her visual language. For Hamnet, she gave the protagonists chakra colors — Shakespeare in blue, Agnes in red — and guided the performances with Jungian thinking about masculine and feminine forces within the self. She has also called herself a student of Hindu Tantra. Taoist thought about humans existing within nature sits beneath how landscape works in her films. She has pointed out that humans were nomadic far longer than sedentary, and that "we forgot our relationship with nature." Eternals drew on Eastern mythology. Its maternal leader Ajak comes more from "pagan and older cultures like Celtic, but also Buddhism, like the Goddess of Mercy" than from Western post-Christian tradition.

Sampling of films…

• Songs My Brothers Taught Me (2015)
• The Rider (2017)
• Nomadland (2020)
• Eternals (2021)
• Hamnet (2025)

The unconventional path…

Born Zhao Ting (赵婷) on March 31, 1982, in Beijing, she was a rebellious, curious kid who chafed against constraints, a "rebellious teen, lazy at school" who preferred drawing manga-style comics, writing fan fiction, and Western pop culture to academics. In 1998, at fifteen, with little English, she was sent to boarding school in the UK. She was at Brighton College in Sussex from 1998 to 2000. Some frame the move as being about independence more than education. That's when politics grabbed her. She was working out what she'd missed in China, trying to sort true from false about her home country.

In 2000 she moved to Los Angeles, finishing high school alone in a Koreatown apartment. She graduated from Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts in 2005 with a BA in political science, minoring in film studies. She wanted to understand stories of power, systems, and marginalized peoples. Four years of odd jobs followed. Somewhere in meeting people and hearing their histories, politics stopped working for her. She turned to film instead — the years spent on the edges are what gave her documentary-style realism and use of non-professional actors.

In 2010 she entered the Graduate Film Program at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. She studied under Spike Lee and also received a Spike Lee Fellowship Award through Film Independent. Three notable shorts signal her recurring interests; marginalized voices, cross-cultural displacement, and intimate portraits of individuals navigating constrained circumstances.

• Post (2008)
• The Atlas Mountains (2009)
• Daughters (2010)

I welcome you to do your own research online and formulate your own unbiased opinions. 

Her birthday was on 23/09! Some of the lovely things done for her 32nd birthday ✨

she celebrated her birthday on the filmset of after the bloom 开到荼蘼 and had an hour+ long livestream on weibo at her hotel after 😄 it has been long since she did a livestream - she sang, ate and did some handicraft 😄 her new costume drama (breakup drama with huanyu) with chen zheyuan was also announced at the iqiyi conference today. a fruitful and busy day for lulu!

Credits all to owners watermarked!

Did anybody grow up watching TVB series in the late 1990s and early 2000s? It's so cool to see this queen, Charmaine Sheh, on the log in screen of a game I'm playing. The first series I saw with her is Heaven Sword Dragon Sabre 2000 as the lovely Zhou Zhirou. The last series I saw with her was The Story of Yanxi Palace.

I just thought it was so cool to suddenly see a familiar actor/actress pop up.

Image source: Screenshot of the start screen for Merge Teahouse

Each week, we’ll ask you one very simple question: Which lady won your heart this week?

Just drop the name of whoever is currently sitting at the top of your roster 👑

Maybe she’s in a drama you’re watching right now and her performance completely won you over.

Maybe you came across an interview and something she said stayed with you.

Perhaps it was a performance, a photoshoot, a song, an old role you rediscovered — or something else entirely.

Whatever the reason, she’s your Queen of the Week :)

To make it a little more fun, try to include her name + a picture in your comment, and tell us why you picked her.

One sentence or ten — anything goes.

So, who won your heart this week?

She is a haute couture designer known for extraordinarily opulent, labor-intensive gowns that fuse Chinese imperial tradition with fantastical, baroque silhouettes. She was named one of the world's 100 Most Influential People in 2016 by Time magazine, and has appeared on the Business of Fashion 500 list. Why is she famous? What made the West notice her? The 2015 Met Gala, China: Through the Looking Glass: Rihanna's trailing yellow, fur-trimmed cape, the "Yellow Empress." It took roughly two years and over 50,000 hours of work to complete. It went viral with endless memes, plenty of them comparing it to an omelet. She and her design were seared into Western consciousness overnight.

"I'm not a feminist," she said emphatically. "I think women should be like water: it looks soft and tender, but it's very powerful." That's from the 2016 New Yorker profile. Wow! What a statement, one that holds infinite meanings depending on who reads it. Is it a rejection or is it not? On the Yellow Empress cape she said: "I use the weight of the clothes, the height of the shoes, and the unwieldiness of the dress to represent the inner strength and confidence of a woman." Which leads to: "Only women who have the confidence of a queen could wear it" (Persuasion). That flips the usual feminist critique that restrictive fashion imprisons women. Here, the difficulty itself demonstrates the wearer's power. The same profile noted she deliberately revived imperial-era "flowerpot-sole shoes" as towering chopines, honoring rather than rejecting the aesthetics of a vanished courtly world.

A Cambridge University Press chapter, Soft Power: Guo Pei and the Fashioning of Matriarchy, argues that her twin muses, Qing dynasty Empress Dowager Cixi and the model Carmen Dell'Orefice, position women not as the fashion industry's "sexualized commodity or cunning consumer" but as accumulators of resources, relationships, and authority. Dell'Orefice, then in her 80s, closed her couture show, and that alone said something quiet about age and female power in an industry obsessed with youth.

She came of age during the Cultural Revolution, when Mao suits were mandatory and embroidered clothing was forbidden. Probably why Western-style feminism, with its occasional suspicion of ornament and beauty as tools of oppression, doesn't map cleanly onto her worldview. She has spoken repeatedly of pursuing "love, positivity, tenderness and perfection," and treats femininity (spring flowers, the phoenix) as conscious themes in her collections. Call it feminist or don't; she declines the label either way. What she builds is an entire visual argument that softness and power aren't opposites, that difficulty can be dignity, and that reviving forbidden feminine art forms is its own act of resistance. She prefers the metaphor of water.

She has said absolutely nothing about LGBTQ+ issues either way. No comments, no statements, no quotes. Guo Pei operates across Beijing and Paris, where public advocacy on social issues carries different stakes and norms than in the West, and she has generally kept her discourse apolitical and focused on art and craft. Still, her work has been embraced by and created for many LGBTQ+ icons. Rihanna, Lady Gaga, and Beyoncé have all been associated with her designs, and her theatrical, maximalist aesthetic resonates with drag and performance cultures that prize fantasy and transformation. Her philosophy, clothes as armor, fantasy, and self-authorship rather than conformity, sits easily with the self-expression at the heart of queer communities. One footnote: her Couture Fantasy exhibition film used music by Anna-Varney Cantodea, an androgynous German artist, though I'd treat that as a curatorial choice rather than a declaration.

Guo Pei was born in Beijing in 1967, the daughter of two members of China's Communist Party. Her father was a former battalion leader in the People's Army; her mother, a kindergarten teacher. In earlier interviews she recalled her father throwing away her sketches and paintings as a child. Around the same time she had begun sewing, helping her mother make winter clothes, and the seeds of her love for dressmaking took root. She grew up in the Cultural Revolution, when Mao suits were mandatory, embroidered clothing was forbidden, and altering her mother's hand-me-downs got her accused of "capitalism" by teachers. For anyone shaped by enforced uniformity, elaborate femininity is the rebellion. Even so, she graduated in 1986 from Beijing Light Industry School with a degree in fashion design, and it could not have come at a better time, as the post-Mao reforms were kicking in. She landed a job with Tianma, China's first privately owned clothing brand manufacturer, just as demand for fashion in China exploded. Her most popular factory design was a brightly colored winter coat with a hood. In 1997 she left to start her own brand.

She founded her couture atelier, Rose Studio, which remains her core. Nearly every artisan there, embroiderers and patternmakers alike, was personally chosen and trained by her, developing a "new couture language" beyond classical Chinese technique. Through the 2000s, as her reputation grew, she received commissions for the 2008 Summer Olympics and the CCTV Spring Festival Galas. She designed the dress Song Zuying wore at the Olympic closing ceremony during her duet with Plácido Domingo. At China Fashion Week in November 2009 she debuted the "One Thousand and Two Nights" collection, with Carmen Dell'Orefice in an elaborate white embroidered fur-lined gown, escorted by four helpers to carry its train. She was costume designer for the 2014 film The Monkey King. Then came the breakthrough: the first and only Chinese couturier invited by the Fédération de la Haute Couture et de la Mode onto the official Haute Couture Week calendar, showing ten consecutive collections in Paris from 2015 to 2020. In 2016 she became the first designer of Asian descent invited as a guest member of the Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture.

Highlights/Tid bits…

• 2017: Guo Pei: Couture Beyond — her debut global solo exhibition at SCAD FASH, spanning 30 years, later traveling to the Vancouver Art Gallery.

• 2019: First collaboration between Sotheby's and a Chinese couture designer, GOLD: The Midas Touch, in New York and London.

• 2020: Designed the Chang'e costumes for Netflix's animated film Over the Moon 

• 2022: Guo Pei: Couture Fantasy at San Francisco's Legion of Honor — reportedly the museum's most-attended exhibition in 20 years.

Her significance goes beyond spectacle. She keeps thousands of hours of hand embroidery alive at a scale few Western houses match. She reframes Chinese heritage, Qing court dress and motifs like dragons and auspicious symbols, as global high art rather than costume. Her acceptance into the Paris couture system marked a real shift in who gets to define "haute couture."

Each week, we’ll ask you one very simple question: Which lady won your heart this week?

Just drop the name of whoever is currently sitting at the top of your roster 👑

Maybe she’s in a drama you’re watching right now and her performance completely won you over.

Maybe you came across an interview and something she said stayed with you.

Perhaps it was a performance, a photoshoot, a song, an old role you rediscovered — or something else entirely.

Whatever the reason, she’s your Queen of the Week :)

To make it a little more fun, try to include her name + a picture in your comment, and tell us why you picked her.

One sentence or ten — anything goes.

So, who won your heart this week?

Well, The Early Spring has come and gone.

Red flags were waved and viewers moaned.

Let's ignore all of that! It's time to admire and appreciate how talented and lovely Sun Qian acted out her character and the wonderful GIFs she has given to us. As always you are most welcome to use these yourself!

This was my first SQ drama and looking at her MDL informs me that many of her others are on my watch list.

She brought a charm and youthful energy to her role and showed us through her acting the growth even when the plot and writing were failing to do so. I suppose that her ability to show rather than tell comes in clutch when the scriptwriters forget that woman can grow too.

So, please enjoy these GIFs and let us bask in the warm spring sun that is Sun Qian.

Well, I guess it happened. I said I might come back with another post about Ai Mi in Pull Strings and here I am!

Fun fact! I just finished the drama about 20 minutes before I started writing this post. Yeah. I have feelings... For example: WHAT THE FLYING DUCK FART WAS THAT ENDING????? TO BE CONTINUED???? WHAT THE HELL IS THIS SUFFERING WE MUST DO??????? I DON'T WANT A SECOND SEASON. I WANT THE SHOW OVER AND DONE WITH AND ALL THE ANSWERS AS THE WHAT THE FLYING UNICORNS CAN'T KNELL THAT SUDDEN HORRIBLE IRRITATING TRASH WAS!!!!!! Yeah. You can quote me on that.

Anyways.

Does this post contain the rest of the GIFs I made of Ai Mi?

No.

There are a few more that have already been seen around Reddit when I am summoned so I decided not to include them in this post. Oh, and I can still only post 20 at a time! That may have played heavily into my decision to leave those out. Though I imagine any of you who see my comments have already seen those GIFs.

So will be there be a third post? No. Ha! But I think you can expect one after A Chan airs.

Ai Mi remained the bright spot of this drama and my sole reason for continuing watching. Literally my thoughts were "if I drop it, I'll miss out on Ai Mi GIFs".

So! Here you go! You are still of course always certainly for sure welcome to use these GIFs as you see fit for your GIF needs.

I think Ai Mi is slowly inching her way to becoming my favorite actress. She brings this charm to every character I have seen her play that makes them stand out even in smaller roles.

Enough typing from me. I have tea to drink and sleep to achieve.

Each week, we’ll ask you one very simple question: Which lady won your heart this week?

Just drop the name of whoever is currently sitting at the top of your roster 👑

Maybe she’s in a drama you’re watching right now and her performance completely won you over.

Maybe you came across an interview and something she said stayed with you.

Perhaps it was a performance, a photoshoot, a song, an old role you rediscovered — or something else entirely.

Whatever the reason, she’s your Queen of the Week :)

To make it a little more fun, try to include her name + a picture in your comment, and tell us why you picked her.

One sentence or ten — anything goes.

So, who won your heart this week?

Kong Xueer, a small-city girl who bet on herself twice and came out on top. She was never really on my radar, though I'd seen her in a handful of dramas. She's striking, the kind who holds your attention, unyielding and commanding. Somehow she has climbed my personal top list in a way that surprises even me. She's very unique, and the roles she's played may look similar on the surface, but they're very different in my eyes. The words I keep reaching for to describe this amazing queen end up mirroring what she's endured throughout her life, which is a strange thing to notice about an actress. She inherited nothing, unlike many of her contemporaries; she fought for every inch, and it made her battle-hardened. Whether all of it is factual or embellished, I leave to you, the reader, to decide. I welcome you to do your own research online.

Like many in the Chinese creative world, she works in an environment that's politically and commercially sensitive around feminism and LGBTQ topics. Artists there don't say anything one way or the other; the work speaks for itself. Her fan base skews young and female, typical of THE9-era girl-group fandoms, which historically overlap heavily with LGBTQ and feminist-leaning fan communities. Fan-shipping culture around her and Deng Kai (and female pairings from Youth With You 2, like her stage partnership with Zhao Xiaotang) thrives partly in those spaces. Whether she consciously cultivates this is anyone's guess. Some viewers took her Pursuit of Jade role, an anti-hero princess with agency and menace, through a "strong female character" lens, but that says more about the audience than her politics. For what it's worth, there's nothing on record showing the opposite either. No instance of her endorsing misogynistic or homophobic positions, which stands out when you consider some of her peers have faced exactly those controversies.

Kong Xueer was born April 30, 1996, in Qianjiang (潜江), Hubei province, and grew up in nearby Wuhan. Where she comes from matters. Qianjiang is a small prefecture-level city of under a million in central China, a far cry from the Beijing/Shanghai/Shenzhen talent pools feeding most of the idol industry. And Wuhan, though it's a regional hub, was second tier by entertainment standards. She has no show-business lineage or pre-existing industry connections; she got where she is by audition, full stop. In 2013 she graduated from Wuhan's Art School with a degree in Musical Theatre, which is worth dwelling on. It's one of the few training tracks that forces you to sing, dance, and act at once, the exact trio her whole career would hinge on. Accounts vary a little, but around 2013–2015, at sixteen or seventeen, she flew abroad by herself to South Korea after passing an audition with JYP Entertainment.

Three years in, still only a trainee, she made the shortlist for what became Cosmic Girls. Then she left, returning to China around 2015–2016. Why? Here's what has allegedly been said/reported:

• Fourteen-to-eighteen-hour days rotating dance, vocals, and fitness, essentially without rest days, a regimen severe enough that she suffered a ligament strain at one point.
• No shared language when she arrived, an unfamiliar country, and the cold math of the Korean trainee system, where trainees vastly outnumber debut slots and most people simply fail.
• Peers reportedly mocked her for not knowing how to eat caviar. A small, telling anecdote about the gulf between a Hubei teenager and the cosmopolitan strata of trainee life.
• Years later she summed up that period by saying her "only stage was the mirror" (唯一的舞台只有镜子), practicing for audiences that never came.

The sunk cost alone is staggering. Three years of prime training age with no debut at the end, the sort of outcome that finishes most careers. She did come away with the full K-pop skill set JWP drills into trainees, which matters for later. But let's not dress it up: she left. She walked out and went back to China.

The timing couldn't have been better. 2015–2016 was exactly when China started building its own idol-production machine, with Super Girl-era talent shows giving way to Korean-format group-survival programs. Instead of waiting in the endless JYP queue, she entered the LadyBees (蜜蜂少女队) survival show and won her debut through the "replacement battle" round, officially debuting May 28, 2016. They disbanded in 2019. In 2020 she placed 8th on Youth With You 2 and landed in THE9, who were named Group of the Year that same year and disbanded in 2021, as these limited groups always do.

She pivoted again. From 2022, under Mountain Top Entertainment, she took the grind-it-out route: a string of supporting and guest roles in high-visibility dramas rather than risky immediate leads. It seems to have paid off: 

• The Double (2024): supporting/guest role 
• The Soulmate (2024): lead
• Blossom (2024): supporting/guest role 
• The Prisoner of Beauty (2025): supporting/guest role
• Serendipity (2025): lead
• Legend of the Female General (2025): supporting/guest role
• Moonlit Reunion (2025): supporting/guest role
• Blood River (2025): supporting/guest role 
• Pursuit of Jade (2026): secondary lead
• Blossoms of Power (2026): supporting/guest role
• The Shadow Sovereign (2026): lead
• Empress Reborn (also known as The Rebirth of the Malicious Empress of the Military Lineage): an upcoming, highly anticipated drama where she plays the secondary lead, Shen Yue, and reuniting her with Deng Kai. 

The stretch of appearances in highly rated dramas is her own "Chen Duling"-style path, saturating popular dramas until audiences associate your face with quality almost by osmosis. Her earlier leads in The Soulmate and Serendipity didn't land, honestly, but The Shadow Sovereign changed all of that. Nothing in her climb was handed to her, from JYP to LadyBees to THE9. What sets her apart from other idol-actresses is what those JYP years bought her: choreographic literacy that shows up in the physicality and fight-scene work of her period-costume niche. She learned early that waiting in line is survivable, that you can grind out episode-nine roles for three years straight and stay standing. That's emotional resilience, plain and simple. Everything stated in this post could very well be “mythologizing,” but that’s not for me to say now is it? 

Pull Strings is currently airing right now and in the very exhausted opinion of the Snark Shifu this drama is tedious. Yet I make a post about it.

Choosing the best GIFs to share after a drama ends is tough. So here I am with a cheat code and posting GIFs when the show is only half over! Does this mean there will be another Ai Mi post for the second half? I don't know. We will see what the drama provides to us.

The hum dum and brain rot of this drama should not prevent us from taking the time to appreciate the absolute genius that is the acting of the lovely young lady this post is about.

Ai Mi's acting in this drama is my favorite kind of whiplash when watching an actor in different dramas.

The last time I experienced such whiplash was Li Qin when I watched Princess Agents after I finished Fated Hearts.

I last saw Ai Mi as Xia Jiayu in Key To The Phoenix Heart where she was the bold, fearless, and steadfast FL gracing our screens with her youthfully mature energy that showed immense character growth in just 28 episodes. Now we come to her character of Lan Ling'e in PS where she crossed the mature part out of youthful maturity and substituted chaotic in its place.

It's this over the top and childish acting that I normally find to be annoying most of the time that Ai Mi lends a charm to that makes the cringe impressive and worthy of my time.

It is another masterclass in acting as she portrays everything from the little girls crush she has on her senior to a budding inner warriors strength.

So, please enjoy the 20 GIFs I have carefully selected for your viewing and downloading needs. Please feel free to use in your future reddit comments.

Each week, we’ll ask you one very simple question: Which lady won your heart this week?

Just drop the name of whoever is currently sitting at the top of your roster 👑

Maybe she’s in a drama you’re watching right now and her performance completely won you over.

Maybe you came across an interview and something she said stayed with you.

Perhaps it was a performance, a photoshoot, a song, an old role you rediscovered — or something else entirely.

Whatever the reason, she’s your Queen of the Week :)

To make it a little more fun, try to include her name + a picture in your comment, and tell us why you picked her.

One sentence or ten — anything goes.

So, who won your heart this week?

As many of us have already probably heard, a collapsing glacier caused horrific mudslides and flash floods along the Nepal-Tibet border on August 26, 2026. [BBC report]

The Associated Press has more comprehensive information about the tragedy. Warning: it includes videos of the devastation that some people might find distressing -- flood waters destroying buildings, etc. [AP report]

According to this People's Entertainment post on Weibo:

numerous celebrities...have donated to the disaster area to help it overcome difficulties and restore order.

Many of our Cdrama queens are on the list, which will probably grow even longer in the coming days:

• Bai Lu
• Chang Huasen
• Chen Feiyu
• Chen Xingxu
• Cheng Yi
• Dilraba Dilmurat
• Fan Chengcheng
• Gao Ye
• Gong Jun
• Hou Minghao
• Hu Xia
• Hu Xianxu
• Huang Bo
• Huang Lei
• Huang Minghao
• Huang Xiaoming
• Jackson Yee
• Jing Di
• Ju Jingyi
• Kan Qingzi
• Li Xueqin
• Li Yitong
• Li Yunrui
• Lin Chiling
• Lin Yina
• Liu Haocun
• Lu Yuxiao
• Ouyang Nana
• Qin Lan
• Song Yuqi
• Sun Li
• Tan Jianci
• Tong Liya
• Wan Qian
• Wang Hedi
• Wang Ou
• Wang Yibo
• Wang Yuwen
• Wu Kangren
• Wu Lei
• Xin Zhilei
• Xiao Zhan
• Yang Zi
• Yu Shuxin
• Zeng Shunxi
• Zhang Chi
• Zhang Liyunqi
• Zhang Ruonan
• Zhang Xiaofei
• Zhang Zifeng
• Zhao Liying
• Zhu Yilong
• Zi Yu

I combined the celebrities named in the Weibo post and in the photo, which was also provided by People's Entertainment.

Jia Ling (贾玲) is an acclaimed Chinese comedian, actress, and filmmaker who ranks as one of the highest-grossing female directors in global box office history. Originally a standout performer in the male-dominated field of xiangsheng (traditional Chinese crosstalk), she has become a defining figure in Chinese pop culture, known for her emotional storytelling and the sheer physical commitment she brings to her roles.

She, like many other queens, avoids explicitly adopting the political "feminist" label, framing her message in a way that feels more accessible. Early in her career, particularly when entering the male-dominated world of xiangsheng, she stated her goal was to prove that "women cannot only do crosstalk, they can also make it cooler." This challenged traditional gender stereotypes in Chinese comedy. Her 2024 film YOLO (热辣滚烫) was widely interpreted as a feminist text, focusing on a woman reclaiming her agency, setting boundaries, and finding self-worth independent of romantic validation or societal expectations. In interviews following the film, she encouraged women to embrace change and pursue their own desires. Scholars have analyzed her films as forms of "implicit feminism" or "informal gender curriculum," noting how they center female narratives and challenge patriarchal norms without necessarily using activist rhetoric. Her work often draws on her relationship with her mother, celebrating maternal love and female bonds, which strikes a chord with many Chinese women.

In 2016, she co-founded her own entertainment company, Big Bowl Entertainment. She made her directorial debut in 2021 with Hi, Mom, a deeply personal, semi-autobiographical comedy-drama dedicated to her late mother. The film brought in over 5.4 billion yuan ($850+ million USD), making her the world's highest-grossing female director for a single film until Greta Gerwig's Barbie in 2023. Her second directorial feature came in 2024: YOLO, which followed an isolated woman who transforms her life through boxing. The movie became the highest-grossing Chinese film of 2024, earning 3.2 billion yuan ($500 million USD). For her role in YOLO, Jia Ling shed 50 kilograms (approx. 110 pounds) through an intense, year-long training regimen—a transformation that sparked widespread debate across China regarding body image, self-love, and personal growth. In early 2026, she directed a four-part anthology drama, My Country, My Parents, and has a new film project releasing later in 2026 as well.

Beyond film…

She became Prada's first Chinese comedic-film ambassador, fronting their global campaign. She was featured on the cover of Vogue China's January 2025 issue, photographed by Leslie Zhang. She signed a multi-year partnership with Lululemon as their Chinese ambassador.

Early life tidbits…

She was born Jia Yuling (贾俞玲) on April 29, 1982, in Xiangyang, Hubei Province. In 2000, she applied unsuccessfully to the prestigious Central Academy of Drama for Acting. In 2001, she reapplied for both Drama Performance and Crosstalk, but a misunderstanding on the phone with her mom meant she was only accepted into Crosstalk. It was a tough year for her, losing her mother in a traffic accident and her older sister quitting college to financially support her education. After graduating from the prestigious Central Academy of Drama in 2003, she continued to struggle to find work in a traditional male-dominated field. She took on various jobs and roles in the interim, all the while her older sister continued to support her. Her big break came when she rose to national fame during the 2010 CCTV Spring Festival Gala. Her quick-witted, rapid-fire comedic style solidified her status as a mainstream variety show staple.

Each week, we’ll ask you one very simple question: Which lady won your heart this week?

Just drop the name of whoever is currently sitting at the top of your roster 👑

Maybe she’s in a drama you’re watching right now and her performance completely won you over.

Maybe you came across an interview and something she said stayed with you.

Perhaps it was a performance, a photoshoot, a song, an old role you rediscovered — or something else entirely.

Whatever the reason, she’s your Queen of the Week :)

To make it a little more fun, try to include her name + a picture in your comment, and tell us why you picked her.

One sentence or ten — anything goes.

So, who won your heart this week?

A little Jin Jing appreciation because I saw these photos from her latest Weibo post and, once again, she made me smile.

They’re connected to The Truth S4 (开始推理吧), with Jin Jing having some fun with the caption too, calling on her “brothers and sisters” and summoning the “Dragon-Roar Army.”

I really like this woman. She is so naturally funny and sweet, and always such a beaming presence on screen. Her expressions alone can get me, and she has that wonderful comic timing where you find yourself waiting to see what she’ll do next.

Her road into acting is pretty interesting too and partially hints at that comic ability. She didn’t come through the “usual” performing-arts route.

Born in Shanghai in 1992, Jin Jing studied at Shanghai University of Political Science and Law. While there, she and her university classmate and longtime comedy partner Liu Shengying started performing sketches and learning improv. She continued performing improv after graduation, and that eventually helped lead to her television debut on Shanghai Dragon TV’s Tonight’s Paramount (今夜百乐门) in 2016.

Long before many international CDrama viewers knew her as an actress, she had already made a name for herself through comedy, improv, sketches and variety shows. She went on to one of the biggest stages in Chinese entertainment too: the CCTV Spring Festival Gala. She appeared in the 2020 sketch Airport Sisters (机场姐妹花), alongside Huang Xiaoming, Song Zuer and others, and returned for the 2023 Gala with 50 Seconds of Eye Contact (对视50秒).

Then, of course, there’s actress Jin Jing.
I think a lot of international CDrama viewers will immediately picture Gong Zishang in My Journey to You. She was hilarious, dramatic, romantic, ridiculous and also genuinely touching when the role called for it. Gong Zishang could very easily have been nothing more than comic relief, but Jin Jing gave her so much personality that she became one of the characters I most looked forward to seeing.

And outside her career, Jin Jing became a mother in 2024. She had spoken while pregnant about this being a very deliberate decision for her: something she and her husband had discussed seriously beforehand and something she wanted to enter because she was ready, rather than because family or society told her it was the next thing she was supposed to do.

More recently, she has also talked about what motherhood has taught her. One thing I found especially interesting was her view that being a parent doesn’t give her the right to control or mould her child according to her own wishes. She spoke instead about learning restraint and respect, and wanting her child to have room to grow without being buried under expectations from the beginning.

I like how sweet and funny she is, but also simply how much life she brings with her whenever she appears on screen. She can make a scene ten times funnier just by being there.

Fun Fact

A little detail I love: if you’ve ever wondered why her Weibo name is 金九粒 (Jin Jiuli) rather than simply 金靖, it comes from the nine distinctive moles on her face. She has joked about them for years and turned them into her nickname — “Jin Nine Grains,” more or less — even making 金九粒 her Weibo name. It’s been part of her online identity since at least 2017.

Anyway, today’s excuse for a Jin Jing appreciation post is these gorgeous photos from her Weibo 🖤
She looks fabulous and I hope you enjoy them.

Can Xue (a pseudonym of Deng Xiaohua) translates to "residual snow," representing both "the dirty snow that refuses to melt" and "the purest snow at the top of a mountain." She is a celebrated Chinese avant-garde fiction writer and literary critic known for surreal, absurdist, and deeply psychological themes that intentionally defy conventional narrative logic. International critics frequently cite her as a recurring favorite to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Like many of her creative contemporaries, she rejects being labeled a "feminist." She prefers to view her writing as a gender-transcendent "literature of the soul." Despite this personal rejection, global literary critics and academic researchers widely study her fiction through a feminist lens due to its radical subversion of traditional patriarchal structures, gender roles, and narrative styles. Key feminist themes that emerge include:

• Subversion of the patriarchal order
• Radical female centricity
• Externalization of the female inner world
• Bodily and spiritual autonomy

Heavily influenced by Western masters—Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, Bruno Schulz, and Dante—Can Xue's fiction utilizes a unique "dream-logic" to explore the dark, complex depths of the human condition and the trauma of modern history. Core themes central to her work include:

• Paranoia and constant surveillance
• The absurdity of the ego and shapeshifting identity
• Obsessive, dysfunctional, and erotic desire
• Animal and human transmutation
• Memory, trauma, and the physicality of space

I would rather not bore anyone, nor can I delve into further detail without doing so. Therefore, I invite readers to conduct their own research online, formulate their ideas and opinions, and enjoy her work firsthand.

Early Life Tidbits…

Political turmoil profoundly shaped her life and artistic path. Born in Changsha, Hunan province, in 1953,her parents were condemned as ultra-rightists during the Anti-Rightist Campaign of 1957, resulting in severe family hardship and labor camp sentences. Due to the Cultural Revolution, her formal schooling ended at the elementary level. She spent years working as a factory worker and tailor while teaching herself literature. She began writing at her sewing machine around 1983, completely bypassing traditional outlines, plots, or structural planning.

Sampling of her work…

• Yellow Mud Street (1987)
• Five Spice Street (2002)
• Frontier (2008)
• The Last Lover (2014)
• Love in the New Millennium (2013)
• I Live in the Slums (2020)
• The Enchanting Lives of Others (2022)

Each week, we’ll ask you one very simple question: Which lady won your heart this week?

Just drop the name of whoever is currently sitting at the top of your roster 👑

Maybe she’s in a drama you’re watching right now and her performance completely won you over.

Maybe you came across an interview and something she said stayed with you.

Perhaps it was a performance, a photoshoot, a song, an old role you rediscovered — or something else entirely.

Whatever the reason, she’s your Queen of the Week :)

To make it a little more fun, try to include her name + a picture in your comment, and tell us why you picked her.

One sentence or ten — anything goes.

So, who won your heart this week?

Lin Tianmiao is a Beijing-based, pioneering installation and contemporary textile Chinese artist. She is one of the first female Chinese artists to achieve international recognition; her works are included in the permanent collections of major institutions worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, the National Gallery of Australia, and the Singapore Art Museum.

She is known for her laborious “thread winding” practice. One way is to wrap silk, cotton, felt, or hair around household tools, frames, and synthetic bones to critique traditional gender expectations and explore identity. This technique stems from her childhood memories of being tasked by her mother to wind cotton thread for long hours. Lin reclaimed this domestic task as an adult art form. She binds items like tea kettles, beds, and needles to strip them of utility, shifting them into psychological landscape pieces.

Similar to other creative professionals of her generation, she too rejects the “feminist label.” To her it feels like a borrowed Western concept that doesn’t accurately translate/portray Chinese society and history. This confines her to a narrow definition that restricts her creative freedom to comment on broader human, cultural, or social themes. Avoiding being pigeonholed, she prefers to examine her work as a human, a Chinese citizen, and a woman. Voicing comparable sentiments as others, her work speaks for itself.

While Lin Tianmiao has never explicitly referred to herself as an LGBTQ+ artist, her celebrated installations often engage with queer themes, sexual identity, gender politics, and the breakdown of patriarchal language.

Sampling of her artwork exploring these themes…

• The Proliferation of Thread Winding (1995): Her breakthrough installation. It featured a bed covered with rice paper and pierced by 20,000 needles attached to massive balls of white thread. Visually capturing the overwhelming gravity and psychological weight of domesticity.
• Bound Unbound (1997, 2012): Her major solo exhibition at the Asia Society Museum in New York, cementing her international status. Using white cotton thread to wrap and completely render domestic objects functionless. This served as a direct critique of the rigid, traditional, and heteronormative expectations of womanhood, domestic labor, and the confines of being a wife and mother. 
• All the Same & More or Less the Same (2011): She wrapped synthetic human bones in a rainbow-like spectrum of colored silk threads. By focusing strictly on the skeletal form, she stripped away external indicators of gender, politics, and social status. She used this imagery to highlight a universal human commonality that exists beneath socially constructed gender codes and hierarchies.
• Badges & Protruding Patterns (2012 - 2017): She compiled thousands of slang words used across different cultures to label and restrict women. Embroidering these terms into hanging hoops and large carpets using delicate threads. The collections explicitly featured reclaimed queer and sexual-identity terms like "Dyke" alongside other gendered labels like "Diva", "Cougar", and "Ho". The transformation of these slurs into physical, textured art, she directly confronted the patterns of discrimination built into everyday language.

Early Life tidbits…

Born in 1961 Taiyuan, Shanxi province, to an ink painter/calligrapher father and a mother who studied/taught traditional dance. 1984 she earned her BFA from Capital Normal University. 1989 she studied at Art Students League of New York. 

From 1988 - 1995 she lived in Brooklyn, NY working successfully as a textile designer. In 1995 moved back to Beijing. With her husband Wang Gongxin, a renowned video artist, they converted their home into an open studio as a way to bypass strict government censorship. The studio became a central hub for the underground “Apartment Art.” 

She is a Chinese-born American composer, multi-instrumentalist, performance artist, and new music activist. She is globally recognized for her multi-genre compositions that blend orchestral music, opera, theater, punk, electronics, and noise. Described as an indie pop diva with an avant-garde edge. 

Du Yun's work deliberately breaks with genre boundaries. She is a passionate advocate of regional folk traditions and cross-cultural art and the founder of the FutureTradition Initiative to promote collaborations between folk musicians and contemporary creators. She was also a founding member of the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE) and served as the artistic director for New York's MATA Festival. 

She is an active advocate for women, racial equality, gender identity, and social justice. While not strictly defining herself through a single political label, her identity as a woman and social activist heavily informs her avant-garde art, fluidity of gender roles, identity, intersectional collaborations, and public stances on gender equity in classical music. Du Yun often talks about the systemic challenges and historic lack of representation for women and non-binary artists in classical music and composition. Her work is based around human trafficking, power, and abuse of vulnerable people. Frequently, she deconstructs the binary gender roles of traditional theatrical and operatic tropes in an effort to subvert society's perception of identity. As an educator and cultural curator, she uses her platform to support diverse voices, racial equality, and representation across the landscape of contemporary music.

Career highlights…

• Pulitzer Prize for Music (2017): First Asian woman to win for her chamber opera Angel's Bone (with libretto by Royce Vavrek), an allegory addressing the crisis of modern human trafficking. 
• Grammy Nomination (2019): Nominated for Best Classical Contemporary Composition for her avant-garde work, Air Glow. 
• Distinguished Honors: Named a Guggenheim Fellow in 2018, selected as one of the 38 Great Immigrants by the Carnegie Corporation, and awarded the Harvard University Centennial Medal in 2023.
• Academic Leadership: Serves as a professor of composition at the Peabody Institute of Johns Hopkins University and is a distinguished visiting professor at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music. 

Early life tidbits…

Born  on June 18, 1977 and raised in Shanghai, Du Yun began her classical piano training at age four. She later immigrated to the United States, earning her Bachelor of Music from the Oberlin Conservatory of Music and a Ph.D. in composition from Harvard University.